Signal Processing

WALLOPS FLIGHT FACILITY, Va. The Missile Defense Agency announced that it launched three short-range ballistic missile targets near-simultaneously from NASA’sWallops Flight Facility. Two U.S. Navy Aegis Ballistic Missile defense (BMD) destroyers then acquired and tracked the targets, while another destroyer also participated in associated operations.

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom. Officials at Unlimited Technology, Inc., in Chester, Springs, Pa., chose Blighter Surveillance Systems to provide its Blighter B400 Series e-scan radars to help secure the perimeter of a strategic air base in the Middle East.

TEWKSBURY, Mass. Raytheon engineers upgraded the computer processor of the AN/TPY-2 ballistic missile defense radar, which will allow the system to work better during raids and more quickly and accurately discriminate between a missile's warhead, and non-threats such as countermeasures.

SAN DIEGO. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA‑ASI), officials announced that they flight tested a pre-production Due Regard Radar (DRR), which marks the first functional air-to-air radar on a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that meets the requirements for “Due Regard” operations in international airspace. Enabling such technology will help in the long run integrate UAVs into international and domestic airspace.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. General Dynamics UK awarded GE Intelligent Platforms with $100 million in orders for open architecture, embedded computing subsystems that General Dynamics UK will use onboard the British army’s SCOUT Specialist Vehicle (SV) platforms.

Several design approaches exist for implementing beamforming processing tasks, with options ranging from GPUs to multicore CPUs, DSPs, and FPGAs. The unique strengths of FPGAs make them an increasingly appealing choice for beamforming when compared to their counterparts.

Signal processing fuels radar and electronic warfare systems as each application has an unquenchable thirst for more and more bandwidth and performance that is more often than not met by FPGA-based VPX computing systems.